The Mighty Mouse Celebrates its 40th Anniversary

Posted Tuesday 9th December 2008 by admin in Uncategorized.

Mickey Mouse may be 80, but today another mouse is celebrating its 40th birthday.  On the 9th of December, 1968, an expectant audience were treated to a glimpse of what was to become a standard issue computer peripheral; the mouse.  The celebrations are taking place in sunny California to toast the 40th anniversary of the first demonstration of a mouse by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute.

The idea for the development came to Engelbart whilst attending a conference on computer graphics in 1961. He expresses that he was frustrated by the lack of vision for the future of computer technology and could see that being able to point to a place on the screen was always going to be important; and so set about creating the mouse with help from fellow colleagues at the SRI, California.

Video footage shows a demonstration of a single buttoned wooden mouse.  The demonstration shows that the wooden block has two wheels in the base, one for tracking vertical movement, and the other for tracking horizontal.  The two minute clip also answers the question of why it is called a mouse, with Englebart sheepishly admitting “I don’t know why we call it a mouse… it just started that way and we never did change it.”

The technology behind the mouse has changed little in 40 years.  Although the original wheels were replaced by a ball, a design which in turn was superseded by a mouse that uses a small camera to track movement, there is evidence that technology might well be repeating itself. Whilst watching the footage of the original demonstration I was moved to remember the recent launch of a very expensive and high tech mouse named Jupiter.  This is a perfectly carved wooden sphere made from the Chinese Flowering Ash which uses an accelerometer to track movement.

The secret of the mouse’s success has been in its simplicity and straightforward ability to control an on-screen cursor;  and although technology is advancing at a dizzying pace, Rob Skitmore of the Science Museum in London forecasts that the mouse is here to stay. Some have speculated that touch screen technology would lead to the demise of the faithful desktop rodent, even when it presents itself in the form of an expensive and stylised sphere.  But in reality, the desktop tracking screens that are currently in development will be a glorification of a touchpad mouse, and may well have the longevity to outlive dear old Mickey.

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